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Monthly Archives: September 2010

What is an A-buffer? In its simplest form, an A-buffer is a memory buffer that stores a list of fragments per pixel. A Z-buffer stores only the nearest fragment for each pixel while an A-buffer can store several fragments for each pixel.

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According to Slashgear Thiago works at Ubisoft Digital Arts, but unsurprisingly his interests span a huge range of 2D and 3D technologies including character animation, physics, tools for artists, math, fluid dynamics and molecular dynamics. In the past he’s worked on the FX for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and demo videos for Microsoft Zune.

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According to now defunct LinkedIn account, British branch of Microsoft Research team is working on getting IA-128 to achieve “full binary compatibility on the existing IA-64 instructions in the hardware simulation to work for Windows 8.”

The fact that Windows 8 and Windows 9 kernels are to support the 128-bit CPU architecture speak for itself, but the physical hardware is coming sooner than most people think. It isn’t hard to predict what processors will support 128-bit instruction set – not on the CPUs coming next year, but starting from 2011, we should see 128-bit CPUs coming our way, such as AMD Bulldozer core. The question is in the air for Intel’s Haswell architecture. Haswell is the successor to Sandy Bridge architecture [Nehalem-Westmere / 45nm-32nm, Sandy Bridge-Ivy Bridge / 32nm-22nm], but besides bringing Larrabee set of features into the CPU, not much is known about the part.

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AMD Fusion is a new approach to processor design and software development, delivering powerful CPU and GPU capabilities for HD, 3D and data-intensive workloads in a single-die processor called an APU. APUs combine high-performance serial and parallel processing cores with other special-purpose hardware accelerators, enabling breakthroughs in visual computing, security, performance-per-watt and device form factor. Software developers, utilizing AMD drivers, libraries and either the ATI Stream SDK2 or the Microsoft DirectCompute API, can enhance the user experience and speed application performance by developing applications that fully utilize the unique compute power of the AMD Fusion™ Family of APUs and AMD discrete GPUs.

APU designs enable an amazing experience in any form factor, and are designed to provide significant advantages in power and design simplicity over competing multi-chip solutions.

AMD Zacate
Zacate is AMD’s 18W APU aimed at the mainstream notebook market (~$500 notebooks). The APU features a pair of Bobcat cores and a Cedar-class AMD DX11 GPU. Zacate package has a single 64-bit DDR3 memory interface ala Atom. Unlike Atom however, both the Bobcat cores and the DX11 GPU should be relatively high performance.

AMD views Fusion targets not only bring better gaming performance to the market, but also enable a lot of new GPU compute applications. With this type of GPU compute in the entry level, it’s only a matter of time before developers start to do something with it.

The Zacate GPU performance we’re seeing here today is completely unoptimized as well. The clocks aren’t final, drivers aren’t fine tuned and although we’re close to release, there’s still potentially more performance on the table.

AMD Zacate will make note-book market again interesting and full of challanges.
Read more at AnandTech

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OpenMM is a library which provides tools for modern molecular modeling simulation. As a library it can be hooked into any code, allowing that code to do molecular modeling with minimal extra coding.

Moreover, OpenMM has a strong emphasis on hardware acceleration, thus providing not just a consistent API, but much greater performance than what one could get from just about any other code available.
Download library at OpenMM Project: Simtk.org